Claremont professor Harry Jaffa's recent attack on Joe Sobran distresses me most in its unfortunate and misguided understanding of political theory, and the shambles it makes of the relationship of power, truth, and politics.
Professor Jaffa, an eminent theorist and teacher, was kind to me during my grad student days 30 years ago. He is the perfect host, friendly and hospitable. Thus my surprise that he repeatedly employs personal attacks to derail Sobran's inquiry into Lincoln. Indeed, Jaffa attempts to sully Sobran's argument by throwing him in with various undesirables who have also attacked Lincoln; but this is to tar Sobran, not to refute him.
Jaffa's references include, "White Citizens Councils in the 1950s," "Sobran's Confederate friends, who saw no reason at all to abolish slavery," and (my favorite) this gem: "This is the kind of wild and mindless assertion that those of us in this business associate with unreconstructed Confederates, and old line politicians of the Jim Crow South." (If the reader is curious about just who "those of us in this business" are, please see the discussion below on method.)
Jaffa seems bent on branding Joe Sobran as a "disingenuous" racist, a lover of slavery, and a fan of Jim Crow – quite a mouthful.
This "Jim Crow" routine is pure drivel. Why is it here? (Note to Professor Jaffa: Please don't paint me with a white sheet; before you and I were born, my father, a young history and law professor at Notre Dame, was under scathing, relentless attack from the Ku Klux Klan, which is not only racist, as everybody knows, but virulently anti-Catholic, which few find worth mentioning).
Jaffa's anti-Sobran ad hominem, while unlovely, is actually a necessity: If Jaffa can admit that a person could oppose slavery but also support secession, then his theoretical argument falls. So he must prove that Joe Sobran loves slavery as well as secession. It is, frankly, quite unlike Mr. Jaffa to build such an important case on so thin a reed.
The balance of Professor Jaffa's response reveals much more about Jaffa, and Jaffa's Lincoln, than it does about Sobran. As we will see, his explanation amounts to this: Lincoln really didn't believe all those things Sobran quotes. He was speaking to very backward, prejudiced people 150 years ago. If he had told them the truth, he would never have gotten elected. So he lied.
How could this first-rate scholar, whose lifelong, professional view of Lincoln borders on canonization, possibly consider it fruitful to portray his idol as a power-hungry liar in order to vindicate him in a sideline squabble between Jack Kemp and Joe Sobran?
Just as mysterious as his conclusion is his method – the "close reading of the text," so beloved by many students of Leo Strauss (generally called "Straussians"). I have fruitfully employed textual analysis many a time. But method is not theory, it is not the end, the ground of being, the ultimate object of the contemplative activiy, theorein; it is only a method. And it can be used by anyone.
In fact, Jaffa's complains that even Sobran uses it, to his advantage, in questioning Lincoln's views on race. So Jaffa insists on raising it to another level: textual analysis must be combined with "historical imagination." Yes, prodigious analysis of the text can prove, to those who are willing to look beyond the plain and simple meaning of the words, that the message that Lincoln was really trying to send us is diametrically opposed to the plain language he used.
Jaffa's higher meaning emerges as he impatiently recounts his earlier writings: "I explained that Douglas's strategy was to identify Lincoln with abolitionists, the most radical, and radically unpopular, of those in the antislavery coalition. Lincoln's disavowal of abolitionism was absolutely necessary to his political survival in the climate of opinion of Illinois voters in the 1850's. To have failed to make such disavowals would simply have disqualified him as a political leader of the antislavery cause. Sobran knows this, and his present use of these [Lincoln's racist] quotations is simply disingenuous. It was a white public – North no less than South – that was overwhelmingly prejudiced against black people, that he had to persuade."
Jaffa goes on to accuse Sobran: "To understand this however requires some historical imagination – putting oneself in the place of someone in an earlier age – something Sobran seems unable to do."
Jaffa would have us believe that Lincoln, in order to be elected, told the unwashed what they wanted to hear, although he didn't believe it; that he had to lie, not once, but throughout his political life, or jeopardize his "political survival." Jim Crow Sobran, of course, lacks the historical imagination to realize this was necessary.
Friedrich Schiller put it bluntly in his famous (to students of the subject) inaugural speech as the rector of the University of Jena in 1789: if research does not give you all the facts you need to give history the spirit and movement that the times demand, fill in the blanks.
In other words, make it up. (Hegel immediately took him up on it).
Well, imagination can backfire sometimes. Notice what transpires next: Sobran is demanding that we look at Lincoln through the eyes of his own time, in his own words, and finds him a believer in Negro inferiority. In an imaginative attempt to rescue Lincoln from that damning verdict, Jaffa actually makes of him something much more damnable, a lying monster who would say anything – skillfully maneuvering between the abolitionists and "Sobran's confederate friends" – to get elected.
We have, more recently, heard words from another president that ring hollow, but familiar, in the present instance: "I had to preserve my political viability."
Suddenly the reader finds himself shifting from wondering if Lincoln can really be as great as Jaffa says he is, to how he could possibly been as foul as Jaffa here describes him.
Perhaps Jaffa's passion for Lincoln distorts him. Maybe Lincoln isn't all that bad, after all. Jaffa has some very modern, very ideological views concerning equality and majority rule. Perhaps he projects those views on Lincoln. After all, it is Jaffa who asks that we attribute to Lincoln the calculating, power-seeking mentality that is willing to lie. But are these Lincoln's views, or Jaffa's?
A further point: let's remember that the people Lincoln couldn't tell the truth to were his supporters. However prejudiced and backward they might be, these aren't those scurrilous, slave-whupping Confederate pals of Sobran's. Jaffa doesn't even discuss how Lincoln might deal with the truth in dealing with them.
Jaffa tries to get his Lincoln off the hook with this lame assertion: "I believe I have proved that there is no reason to think that Lincoln shared the prejudices of those he would persuade."
Jaffa has contempt for the yokels, but Lincoln needed their votes. As an even lamer excuse, Jaffa throws another canard at Lincoln's benighted supporters, just to make sure Sobran and his pals are vanquished: "But what if the governed [as in, "consent of the governed"] only imperfectly recognize the equal rights which are the title deeds to their own authority?
The people – those indispensable governed whose consent constitutes the majority rule that Jaffa praises to the skies – are pre-modern, non-ideological, even religious, boobs – in a word, dumb. They don't understand even the basics of their own freedoms, the miscreants. Lincoln – and Jaffa – do.
So Jaffa coolly delivers the answer to his own question: If they're dumb, you lie.
The great – the truly great – must lie to the people, to get the consent of the majority, so they can be governed by their natural superiors.
Isn't this what Aristotle called "natural slavery"?
Yet this is Jaffa's conclusion about political philosophy! What an impoverished view of the search for truth – that those who find it must immediately hide it and lie about it!
Vain criticism aside, this is all the legitimacy that Jaffa's Lincoln needed – one man, one vote, once – to move forward to "a more perfect union," breaking all impediments of common law, statute, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Once he had "consent" (however uninformed), and his own notion of perfection (which the masses could not understand, of course), informed by historical imagination, Lincoln had his mandate.
So goes Jaffa's view of the relationship of truth to politics. Namely, there isn't any. Here the Straussian temptation emerges full-force: close reading of the text, a task of which only the illuminated few are capable, reveals one level of Lincoln's rhetoric for the masses (“I’m with you, I'm one of you"), another, often referred to by the Straussians as “secret writing,” visible only to "those of us in this business," the elite coterie to whom Jaffa deigns to introduce to the rest of us.
So much for "Honest Abe."
In the early pages of Plato's Republic, Socrates confronts a sophist by the name of Thrasymachus, who advocates power and convention, rather than truth, as the only basis of political order. Jaffa's expertise on the ancients far exceeds my own. Yet it appears that he and his Lincoln have sided with Thrasymachus, and power, against Socrates, and truth.
Unless, of course, Jaffa's notion of truth is one that can be understood by only a few great men in each generation (Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Jaffa), and that everyone else must be lied to – a modernist version of Plato's "noble lie."
This raises all sorts of other fascinating "what if's": If only Socrates had been willing to lie, to escape the hemlock … if only Christ had been willing to wink, to give Judas the high sign, to play chess with Satan instead of commanding him, "begone!"
Maybe Pilate was right. "What is truth?"
The apparent nature of truth here, malleable and ultimately expendable, is the result of the loss of metaphysics in political theory. Aristotle inquires into the ground of being, on which he builds his philosophical anthropology. The Declaration begins by invoking the Creator and the laws of nature and nature's God, on the basis of which it asserts the rights that God gave man – all men, even the backward yokels of yore.
Our age has trumpeted the denial of metaphysics, and has suffered accordingly. Blind to the relationship of politics to truth, we have no theoretical ammunition against the lust for power. It prospers all around us, often widely applauded by "moralists" who constantly remind us of our "greed" – which is, in fact, a vice of a much lower order, metaphysically speaking.
Both in the fallen angels and in fallen man, the lust for power is stronger than any other passion. Dealing with it realistically prompts the concern of the Founders for limits on power at every level of politics. But all of this evaporates in Jaffa's Lincoln. There we confront a figure – a statesman! – who is bound and determined to get elected, and willing – required – to lie, repeatedly, to achieve his political goal. It scarcely exonerates Lincoln that he deemed the goal supremely important, or that he thought the truth was too "high" or "advanced" for the scurrilous miscreants of his time.
In Jaffa's analysis, it was Lincoln's mission to carry his work of greater perfection forward to "a new birth of freedom" in spite of the backward prejudices of the people. Should they resist, no doubt, the masses to whom he lied because they could not understand would be "forced to be free" – to use Rousseau's wonderful, totalitarian turn of the phrase. After all, he was doing it for their sake, for the people. For humanity.
All of this, of course, perfectly describes the ideological tyrant.
But wait – there's more. To consecrate his enterprise, Jaffa turns to another favorite modernist move, the use of religious symbol to confer authenticity. In his argument that the Constitution was an unbreakable contract, he compares it to the Sacrament of marriage:
"Consider: marriage is a voluntary agreement, or contract, between a man and a woman. Prior to the marriage, each is free to contract alliances with other parties. After marriage, they are entitled to no such freedom. To say that a partner in marriage can end the union, and co-habit with another partner, is in effect to deny that there ever was a marriage at all."
Here is religious revelation indeed. For, if Lincoln's Union (Jaffa's caps) is Sacramental (mine), however secular its nature, Jaffa's assertion that it represents the promise of perfection naturally carries much more weight. After all, it is blessed and prescribed by God. Such a sanctified, unprecedented, and forward-moving consubstantiation of the state with the divine purpose would naturally prevail over the primitive designs of a backward people who didn't even properly understand why they were free in the first place.
So, with Thrasymachus and Hobbes, Jaffa is willing to accept a conventionally-invoked deity for purposes of persuasion of the hoi polloi, but he will reject the existence of the same deity for the purposes of constructing a working political theory.
And this explains an earlier mystery: if the Truth of the Union is Sacramental, it can be understood only by the baptized, the few philosophically advanced people who can discuss it with one another in any given generation (remember them?). But wait – won't most of them have arrived at positions of power because they know when to hide the truth, and when to show it, better than their political opposition (as Lincoln did)? Doesn't that mean, then, that the truly virtuous nation will be the one in which these philosophers rule – even though, of course, they had to lie to get there? Even though hundreds of thousands (in the nineteenth century) or millions (in the twentieth) had to die as a result of this national "advance to virtue"?
Conservatism has long been tempted by a strain of elitist "inquiry" that sports a belief in "secrets" of history that can be boldly divined by the brilliant, close reading of the text, instead of in humbling mysteries that lie beyond the reach of human reason.
However brilliant, this represents the demise of political philosophy. There is no greater good than truth. However appealing the "Noble Lie" might be to contemporary pretenders to the throne of the philosopher king, it always invites disaster.
Solzhenitsyn once said that, while truth will make you free, falsehood always brings violence in its wake. One has only to observe the consequences of the lies, from Lincoln to LBJ and Nixon, to draw one's own conclusions.
And there is one more gnawing question: if Lincoln couldn't tell the truth to the unwashed of his generation, can Jaffa tell the truth to us backward Sobranites?
Or will we have to wait a hundred years for some genius to discern, between the lines, what Jaffa was too smart to tell us?
August 8, 2001
